Advertising

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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Adds Instagram Integration

Instagram is a big deal in the sports nutrition sector so we are a big advocate / lobbyist whatever for Salesforce and Instagram getting it on. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world with over 70 million daily photo uploads and over 2.5 billion likes per day. With an estimated 18% of Irish adults on Instagram, more than 40% of whom visit every single day, the platform is too huge for brands.

It’s also a newly active advertising platform, (#hustle #hustle…) with a range of built in advertising functions, as well as marketing potential for nearly anyone who sells products. While previously closed off to advertisers wanting to use traditional ads, Instagram opened up ads in 2013, and opened their API to select advertisers earlier this year and Salesforce is now jumping on board, integrating advertising, engagement and analytics.

Instagram for Marketers

Instagram first launched more than 5 years ago in 2010, and rapidly gained popularity, garnering more than 100 million active users within 2 years. Today, it has over 300 million active users, with growth rates of over 20% per year, considerably more than parent company, Facebook’s, own 3%. Today, it is the 8th most popular social media network, and integral to marketing campaigns for thousands of businesses around the world, including brands like Jameson (who used the world’s first 3D advertisement on Instagram). Today, Instagram is a powerful social media marketing tool, and they’ve realized that, which led to their launch of their advertising API in June of 2015. Now, top social media enterprise management companies including Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sprinklr are launching functions and tools that work with Instagram’s API, which is set to boost its usefulness to marketers and brands.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud for Instagram

Marketing Cloud literally enables the tracking and classification of billions of data points, social analytics, publishing to social accounts, social advertising management, targeting, and much, much more. All of the new Instagram features are available in Marketing Cloud, which allows you to access and manage your Instagram and other social networks right from the cloud, or via a new mobile app. (I haven’t had a chance to play with yet)

Social.com – Social advertising at scale is very difficult to manage on Instagram but the platform makes it very manageable. The platform also integrates with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn etc allowing you to manage everything in one platform and dashboard. Social.com works with Instagram’s advertising, and its Active Audiences is a cool feature feature allows you to access your Salesforce CRM data, integrating the data for identity based targeting on Instagram, allowing you to target your existing customers, or find new ones based on similar data.

Social Studio – Part of the new series of Instagram management tools include Social Studio, which allows you to publish, manage, track, and analyze the success of content. This allows you to publish, view, and see data on published photos or videos from one post, so that you can more easily see what is performing well, even on cross-platform posts, such as those published to Facebook. Social Studio also allows access to the entire team, including multiple teams, and allows engagement and conversation tracking, based on Radian6’s own conversation tracking. This allows you to track important conversations and respond to them in a timely manner to ensure that customers are happy, or informed enough to make a purchase decision.

Service Cloud – Service Cloud allows you to integrate easy customer service into your Instagram, offering faster response times, keeping better track of conversations, and doing so across platforms, not just on Instagram. Because most of Instagram’s user base are millennials, who value responsive customer service over almost any other business feature, this new Instagram addition has the potential to be extremely beneficial for making sales and retaining customers.

Marketing Cloud – Marketing Cloud allows you to access conversations and discussions about your brand, including mentions, conversations on your own content, and posts about you, on Instagram as well as many other platforms, so that you can see which topics are generating interest, which are not, and how your target demographic feels about your content, or your brand. With Radian6’s publishing tools built in, it allows you to plan, create, and publish new posts based on those conversations, or source it through Marketing Cloud’s partners.

How it Helps Brands

Instagram is a best fit for launching visual branding and storytelling, allowing some of the world’s largest (and smallest) to create stunning visual campaigns based around their products and services. Visual storytelling works with ads, photo content, and videos, allowing brands to simultaneously market products and brand themselves. The new tools and features from Salesforce allow brands to interact with your user base more easily, while managing advertising, conversations, controlling and publishing posts and content, and managing your brand.